An Exchange Between Jason Rockwood of Critical.Org and Kalle Lasn of Adbusters.

Who better to represent your anti-corporate corporation than a woman who makes luxury brands even more luxurious by embuing them with a non-luxurious aura?  Afterall, that’s what Adbusters does for the brands it writes about.

Minter is the hottest fashion photographer in the world right now.  Her career has floundered for the last two decades; only when she cashed in on luxury brands did her work become important.

Like Adbusters, Minter produces nothing original or inherrently creative; you both simply steal the cultural capital of the companies you claim to detest, and use their marketing to sell your own goods.  In the process, you create more cultural capital for the corporations “financing” your pages. The game of reappropriating corporate visibility to use it against itself is a tired cover for the simple fact that if you didn’t talk about companies so relevant to our consumer culture, no one would read your magazine.  For an organization committed to busting ads, you give a lot of press to logos.  Try making an issue where you save the world without mentioning any brand names.  Then see if anyone bothers to read it.

. . . watch that cynicism Jason, or it will get you in the end

Kalle Lasn
Editor-in-chief
Adbusters Media Foundation
www.blackspotshoes.org